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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Rest in Peace Mr. Roger Ebert

We lost a great guy today, and a true champion of Movies! Mr. Roger Ebert, the top Movie Critic of my time! If he liked a movie,chances were great, that I was also going to love it.If he hated it,I was most likely also, going to hate it.We were on the same wave length, when it came to movies.He is a guy I liked to follow on twitter, and he loved posting captions for The New Yorker comics.

When hunting for movies a rental store ,I would always look at a VHS or DVD cover to see it included a review from Mr. Ebert on it.A sign of a great movie! Your Stamp of Approval!I watched every review on your TV show with everyone in America Siskel and Ebert at the Movies. You Sir,will be missed by all ,and by Me one of your biggest fans. I do this blog partly because of you.I hope i can learn to write great Movie reviews like you. I give you two thumbs up!

Here is his last tweet that was for his farewell article in the Chicago Sun Times.

April 2,2013

A Leave of Presence

Thank you. Forty-six years ago on April 3, 1967, I became the film
critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Some of you have read my reviews and
columns and even written to me since that time. Others were introduced
to my film criticism through the television show, my books, the website,
the film festival, or the Ebert Club and newsletter. However you came
to know me, I'm glad you did and thank you for being the best readers
any film critic could ask for.

Typically,
I write over 200 reviews a year for the Sun-Times that are carried by
Universal Press Syndicate in some 200 newspapers. Last year, I wrote the
most of my career, including 306 movie reviews, a blog post or two a
week, and assorted other articles. I must slow down now, which is why
I'm taking what I like to call "a leave of presence."

What in the
world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent
is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a
talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's
more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about
doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

At the same
time, I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking
ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI.
Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a
film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects
under the Ebert brand in the coming year.
Ebertfest, my annual film festival, celebrating its 15th year, will
continue at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, my alma
mater and home town, April 17-21. In response to your repeated requests
to bring back the TV show "At the Movies," I am launching a fundraising
campaign via Kickstarter in the next couple of weeks. And gamers beware,
I am even thinking about a movie version of a video game or mobile app.
Once completed, you can engage me in debate on whether you think it is
art.

And I continue to cooperate with the talented filmmaker
Steve James on the bio-documentary he, Steve Zaillian and Martin
Scorsese are making about my life. I am humbled that anyone would even
think to do it, but I am also grateful.

Of course, there will be
some changes. The immediate reason for my "leave of presence" is my
health. The "painful fracture" that made it difficult for me to walk has
recently been revealed to be a cancer. It is being treated with
radiation, which has made it impossible for me to attend as many movies
as I used to. I have been watching more of them on screener copies that
the studios have been kind enough to send to me. My friend and colleague
Richard Roeper and other critics have stepped up and kept the newspaper
and website current with reviews of all the major releases. So we have
and will continue to go on.

At this point in my life, in addition
to writing about movies, I may write about what it's like to cope with
health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you. It really
stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days
in the hospital. So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability
that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie
so good it transports me beyond illness.

I'll also be able to
review classics for my "Great Movies" collection, which has produced
three books and could justify a fourth.

For now, I am throwing
myself into Ebert Digital and the redesigned, highly interactive and
searchable Rogerebert.com. You'll learn more about its exciting new
features on April 9 when the site is launched. In addition to housing
an archive of more than 10,000 of my reviews dating back to 1967 we will
also feature reviews written by other critics. You may disagree with
them like you have with me, but will nonetheless appreciate what they
bring to the party. Some I recruited from the ranks of my Far Flung
Correspondents, an inspiration I had four years ago when I noticed how
many of the comments on my blog came from foreign lands and how
knowledgeable they were about cinema.

We'll be recruiting more
critics and it is my hope that some of the writers I have admired over
the years will be among them. We'll offer many more reviews of Indie,
foreign, documentary and restored classic revivals. As the space between
broadcast television, cable and the internet morph into a hybrid of
content, we will continue to spotlight the musings of Pulitzer
Prize-winning TV critic Tom Shales, as well as the blog "Scanners" by
Jim Emerson, who I first met at Microsoft when he edited Cinemania. The
Ebert Club newsletter, under editor Marie Haws of Vancouver, will be
expanded to give its thousands of subscribers even bigger and better
benefits.

For
years I devoutly took every one of my tear sheets, folded them and
added them to a pile on my desk. The photo above shows the height of
that pile in 1985 as it appeared on the cover of my first book about the
movies published by my old friends John McMeel and Donna Martin of
Andrews & McMeel. Today, because of technology, the opportunities to
become bigger, better and reach more people are piling up too. The fact
that we're re-launching the site now, in the midst of other challenges,
should give you an idea how important Rogerebert.com and Ebert Digital
are to Chaz and me. I hope you'll stop by, and look for me. I'll be
there.

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.